Brightrock

 Can the Astros make the playoffs?  I had pretty much written off the possibility, but suddenly they are 1.5 games out of first place with 5 games to play.

So, during my visit to Georgia, a new phrase has entered my vocabulary:  meat-and-three.  Charlie took me out to lunch today at the VegOut, a typical meat-and-three restaurant somewhere between Ringgold and Chattanooga.  I'm actually a big fan of little restaurants that you wouldn't go into unless somebody recommended them.  (The Someburger at the corner of 11th and Studewood in the Heights definitely falls into that category.)

Wikipedia's definition of meat-and-three pretty much sums it up:

Meat and three or Meat and three veg is a staple of rural cuisine throughout the world, though most notably in the Southern United States. The name is taken from the choice of any meat and three vegetable side dishes. Often, the menu is set, and in some places, affixed to the wall. The menu is usually Prix Fixe; the price is the same no matter what selections are made. While similar to the blue plate special, blue plate specials can deviate from this format to be anything the management desires to feature. The fundamental philosophy of an affordable yet filling meal is the same.

I'm not normally a big fan of Microsoft - they've done plenty of things over the years that I think have been counterproductive for the computing industry as a whole - but I think that David Kirkpatrick makes a good point in this article, Praising Microsoft - and attacked by wolves.  If not for Microsoft (and of course a few hardware companies like Intel, Compaq, Dell, etc.) I doubt that we would have had access to the kind of cheap computing hardware that has made so many other things possible.  All of those folks who bought their PCs just so they could run Windows 98 and Excel were also, in effect, subsidizing the developers who were writing Apache, MySQL, PHP, Linux, etc. by driving down hardware prices.  I still think that government regulators need to keep an eye on Microsoft, but I agree with Kirkpatrick that they made a huge positive contribution simply by helping the proliferation of cheap computers.